The Biosphere
Vladimir Vernadsky and the Making of Planetary Science, 26 June 2026, Venice

Human activity is transforming the shape, size, and resilience of Earth’s biosphere, degrading and augmenting the Holocene baseline condition at various scales and replacing the wild biosphere with an anthropogenically modified one. Here we evaluate the degree of disharmony in the contemporary biosphere by reference to past change, examining episodes in the fossil record that identify both negative and positive change. We ask what the trajectory of change is in the Anthropocene and show that, arguably, humanity is driving the second highest rate of biosphere degradation in Earth history after the Cretaceous-Palaeogene asteroid strike of 66 million years ago. However, humanity is the first agent of biosphere change capable of reflecting on and potentially transforming its impact on planetary habitability. If we can do this, perhaps we might enable the greatest rate of increase in planetary habitability in Earth history.

A hundred years after the publication of Vladimir Vernadsky’s masterpiece, the Biosphere remains a generative concept – one that has been taken up in different scientific contexts, producing divergent research programs, practices, and visions of the planet. While much has been written on the relationship between the biosphere and Earth System Sciences, this presentation explores a less discussed trajectory: the reception of Vernadsky’s legacy in Geobiology, an interdisciplinary field situated at the interface between biological and geological domains – and in turn problematizing this very distinction.
The ideas and research practices connected to what has been called “deep biosphere”, in particular, resonate and pushes to its furthest consequences some of Vernadsky’s conceptual pillars: a thermodynamic approach to living processes and the continuity between the biosphere and the lithosphere. The study of microbial life in the deep subsurface, the ocean floor, and other extreme environments extends Vernadsky’s biosphere both spatially, reaching kilometres below the Earth’s surface, and temporally, offering a new deep time framework to living processes. By tracing how Vernadsky’s legacy has been taken up to rearticulate the bio- and the geo- as coevolving matter, this presentation aims to show that the planet is a moving target – one that looks different depending on where you stand, what instruments you carry, and what questions you bring to the Earth.

Vernadsky’s Biosphere concept (published in 1926) has retained much of its analytical relevance during the course of the last century. Following an initial muted response in the Soviet Union, the concept was mobilised by a range of Soviet physical scientists from the 1960s onwards in order to address large-scale socio-environmental challenges; and it gained wider acceptance with its formative role in the 1968 UNESCO-sponsored Biosphere conference and association with the work of the ecologist George Evelyn Hutchinson. More recent re-engagement with the concept has been driven in part by its evident complementarity with notions of the Anthropocene. In view of the above, the paper aims to reflect on key aspects of Vernadsky’s Biosphere concept in order to assess its contemporary significance and relevance. This includes (i)the interdisciplinary underpinnings of the concept with its roots in the science of biogeochemistry, (ii)the empirical range and depth of the underlying work, and (iii)the concept’s latent ability to embrace humankind’s growing influence on the wider environment with reference to the idea of the noosphere.

The Moscow School of Biosphere Modeling emerged during the 1970s and 1980s around the Soviet academician Nikita N. Moiseev. The school combined Vernadsky’s ideas on the biosphere and noosphere with cybernetics and system dynamics to investigate the stability of the climate and biosphere, as well as human impacts. The school contributed to later developments in coupled Earth system models and approaches to the stability of the biosphere using explicit mathematical frameworks. I will present the school’s developments regarding the practical applications of Vernadsky’s ideas to the mathematical modeling of the biosphere, simulations of nuclear winter scenarios in 1983, and concepts of approaching life and biosphere from system analysis point of view.

During the final two decades of the Soviet Union’s existence, a green lobby gradually took shape within certain scientific institutions in the country, taking advantage of the relative autonomy granted to them by the regime. The “Scientific Council on Biosphere Problems,” established in 1973, thus followed an interesting trajectory: initially intended to serve as an outlet or diversion for the environmentalist aspirations of a segment of the academic world, it became, in the second half of the 1980s, under the leadership of its director, geologist Aleksandr Yanshin, the heart of scholarly eco-activism, spearheading a series of victories won by this group against productivist pressure groups, particularly against the ministries of water and energy. Its history, recounted through central, regional, and local archives, press reports, and testimonies collected in Russia during the 2010s, demonstrates the influence of Vernadsky’s ideas within a microcosm that played a major role in the ecological critique of the Soviet project, but failed to establish itself as a political force in the context of the country’s democratization, thus illustrating the limits of scientism in the face of the social and cultural challenges and transformations of its time.

The genealogy of Earth system science is a subject of historical debate, which is sometimes hindered by blurry definitions of Earth system science itself. I will attempt to identify Gaia’s specific influence on the constitution of Earth system science. In order to do so, I will start by proposing a new historical account of Gaia. Gaia should be read as an anthropological reflection on global pollution elaborated by one of its best technical experts, and as comprising: a hypothesis or theory (discussed in a very small body of scientific literature); the proposition of a new entity to be studied by new research programs (leading, among many other things, to “Earth system science”); and a philosophy of nature (discussed in broader environmental discourses). Gaia’s conception of the Earth was opposed to various other global conceptions of the 20th century (those of geophysics, geochemistry, biogeochemistry, etc.). The recognition of its influence on the constitution of Earth system science studying global change has not been hindered by Gaia’s New Age flavor, as the story goes, but by Lovelock’s political position on environmental issues. Recognizing this helps explain why Vernadsky was welcomed as a legit precursor by various scientists.

Forthcoming abstract.

Forthcoming abstract.

This paper traces the history of a little-known Soviet scientific project: “geohygiene (geogigiena)”, a concept coined in 1957 by toxicologist Nikolai Lazarev to designate a "new science" devoted to the planetary study of industrialization's effects on human health. Emerging at the intersection of occupational medicine, toxicology, and earth sciences — shaped in particular by Vladimir Vernadskii's work on the biosphere — the project crystallized amid the Soviet postwar Great Acceleration, marked by the mass "chemization" of agriculture and large-scale research programs on pesticides for both civilian and military use.
Following Christophe Bonneuil's call to "historicize planetary environmental reflexivities," this paper reinserts geohygiene into specific "regimes of planetarity" rather than reading it as a simple precursor to contemporary environmental thought. Geohygiene operated simultaneously as a framework for thinking global pollution — structurally akin to the Gaia hypothesis — and as a critical geography of the globalized capitalist economy, informing Soviet selectivity toward imports of ultra-toxic Western pesticides. It was also shaped by the tensions of the "peaceful coexistence" era: in 1968, Andrei Sakharov could invoke it as a call for East-West collaboration “in the interests of all mankind.”
The concept's trajectory — carried by institutions such as Kiev's VNIIGINTOKS, progressively abandoned through the 1970s–80s, leaving no clear institutional legacy — raises broader questions about the conditions of possibility and failure of a global science project forged outside the West, and the epistemic and political obstacles that constrained its reach.

A century after The Biosphere, Vernadskij’s account of life as a planetary biogeochemical force remains foundational for Gaia theory and Earth System Science. His noosphere poses a problem sharpened by recent work on planetary intelligence: can a civilisation whose infrastructures have become planet-altering couple them back to the biospheric conditions they transform, or does it remain an immature technosphere? This paper tests that question in contemporary green finance.
Rather than treating finance only as an economic institution, I examine it as planetary technical infrastructure distributed across central banks, repo markets, data providers, rating agencies, and standards bodies. Green finance renders signs of biospheric perturbation — emissions, ecosystem degradation, water stress, biodiversity loss — actionable for capital allocation, thereby claiming a noospheric function.
Drawing on Rispoli’s reading of Vernadskij’s granitsa as a medium translating biogeochemical information between planetary spheres, and on Sebeok’s biosemiotic critique of Lotman's semiotic closure, I define the noospheric membrane as a boundary-function that must do more than translate signals into an internal code: it must make biospheric consequence binding on technical reproduction.
Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in European central-bank settings, green bond markets, sustainability-data infrastructures, and repo collateral frameworks between 2020 and 2025, I argue that green finance assembles the semiotic architecture of such a membrane — sensing, classifying, projecting — while largely functioning as a mirror. As signs of biospheric perturbation are reformatted as labels, scenarios, KPIs, and collateral classifications, they become increasingly processable within finance but weakly able to interrupt accumulation, liquidity, and collateral circulation. Through variational semiotics, I specify this conversion as a loss of coupling: green finance shows how an immature technosphere may simulate noospheric reflexivity without becoming answerable to the biosphere.